The Annihilator: The Man At The Train Station — Ep. 2 | MK Confidential

Their crime is close to nothing, staying out past midnight with cigarettes, laughing their way down a main street that had long since gone dark.

“In a comfortable town like Westfield, that alone is enough to get you brought in, so they sit, and they wait, red-eyed, for someone to come and claim them.”

The first father arrives rumpled and half asleep, annoyed at the police for not simply driving his daughter home. It's an ordinary dad reaction, the kind of father anyone would recognize. The second father is not like that. The second girl is Patricia List. When her father walks into the police station at half past 2 in the morning, he is wearing a suit, a pressed suit, a clean white shirt, a dark tie, and a faint smell of aftershave.

He had been asleep, someone called to say his daughter was at the station, and before he drove down to get her John List stopped to put on a pressed coat and tie. The police chief James Moran hears about it the next morning, and it sticks with him. Who gets up and puts on a suit, Moran wonders, with a white shirt and tie at 2.30 in the morning. One of his officers has an answer. "Oh, I know that guy," says the officer, "lives in the big house up on Hillside Avenue.

“I've seen him out there mowing his lawn in a suit and tie."”

That night, driving home, John List does not say one word to his daughter.

He is a man who almost never raises his voice, but once they are inside the house in the front hall, under a big amber shandalier, something in him lets go.

"You are out of control," he yells at her. "You are going straight to hell, and there is nothing I can do about it." Four months later, Chief James Moran will stand in the ballroom of that same house and look down at the bodies of Patricia List and her mother, and her two brothers and her grandmother, and the first thing that will come into his head is the man in the suit and tie at 2.30 in the morning. The guy in the suit he thinks, "That guy did this." In this episode, we go back way back to the beginning to find out who that man was and how a shy, devout accountant came to murder his entire family and to tell himself right up to the end that he was doing the right thing.

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He is an only child and from the very first day, he is the center of his mother's world. His father is old and cold. John Frederick List is 64 when his son is born, a stern German immigrant with a dry goods store and a booming voice,

a man who deals with his son mostly through his wife and refers to him always as the boy.

His mother, Alma, is warm but controlling. Intensely religious, she is a devout member of the strict Missouri Synod branch of the Lutheran Church, and she raises her son inside a kind of cocoon. She reads the Bible with him every night, keeps him indoors away from the other children, away from the street, away from anything that might be a bad influence, afraid he could catch a cold or get his hands dirty.

A neighbor once described Alma as a queen, erect and precise, and called little Johnny, her prince.

The family lives on the ground floor of the house, and the boy sleeps on a couch in the parlor,

“a room with no door, and every single morning he has to fold away his sheets and his books, and every trace that he had ever been there.”

John learns to leave nothing behind. He was the neatest little boy I ever saw, a woman who rented from the family said years later,

he never knew he was around.

Another classmate put her to a different way. He was there, but he just blended into the background. The little boy who leaves no trace, he was good at that. Years later, list will describe that time himself to journalist Bill Curtis on American Justice, in a voice as flat and orderly as everything else about him.

It was a quiet childhood.

“I was only child, but you were no brothers with sisters, to either play with or fight with.”

What Alma wants from her son is order and respectability and above all faith, and for a long time that is exactly what he gives her. He is patriotic, and he joins the army in 1943 right out of high school. He does not seem much of the war. He trains in the swamps of Louisiana, ships off to Europe in the last months of fighting,

and is home again by 1946, having spent all told less than a year overseas. He comes back with a handful of standard service medals, a couple of which he will quietly inflate over the years into something grander, and with one souvenir he is genuinely proud of, a styrofoam 1912, an Austrian automatic pistol he bought off of another soldier in 1944. He will not fire it again for another 27 years. While John is still in uniform, his father dies.

“John takes leave to go home for the funeral, and the thing people remember about him there is that he shows no grief at all.”

He holds a neighbor's new baby, he's polite, he seems one relative said as if nothing has happened, like this is all just a part of his day.

After the war he does something else his mother Alma always wanted.

He goes to the University of Michigan on the GI Bill. John studies accounting, earns a business degree, and then a master's, and becomes a certified public accountant. Accounting suits John. It is orderly, everything adds up or is supposed to, and he takes a job with a prestigious firm. When the Korean war comes, he is called back as a commissioned officer, which pleases both John and his mother.

And he spends that war safely state-side in Virginia, touring civil war battlefields on his days off. He loves history, he loves the study of old battles.

It is now 1951, John is 26 years old, and he has never had a real girlfriend.

A few forgettable dates in college, nothing that lasted. With women, he is almost completely inexperienced. Today they might call him an insell, or involuntarily sell a bit. Then on a Saturday night in October, that same year, John goes bowling with a couple of other young officers in Newport News Virginia. And in the next lane is a thin, pretty young woman named Helen.

Helen Taylor is a war widow. Her first husband, a soldier named Marvin, had been killed in Korea just months before, and she is raw with grief, out that night mostly because her sister dragged her along. She is a little older than John, far more experienced, and nothing at all like him. Where John is timid and careful, Helen is impulsive and full of life, quick to laugh, quick to dance, quick to spend money she does not have. John falls hard for her, almost immediately.

Helen is newly widowed, deeply unsettled and drawn to John's steadiness. Within weeks, she is telling him she's pregnant, and John, who does not seem embarrassed by any of it, tells an army friend we have to get married. On December 1, 1951, less than two months after they met at that bowling alley, John and Helen are married in a Lutheran church in Baltimore. Helen does not come into this marriage alone. She has a nine-year-old daughter from her first marriage, Brenda, who at first resents the quiet mild manner, stranger stepping into her dead father's place, but takes almost no time at all to change her mind.

Within a few years, John is taking her ice fishing on the frozen Saginaw River, coaching her through her Lutheran instruction, making pizza for the family on Saturday nights, and Brenda is calling him daddy. Brenda would later say of her stepfather, "If I did something wrong, he never cut me down. He always listened to me. He was there for me." Brenda marries at 18. By 1971, she is grown and long gone, a married and divorced mother of five. She settled near Calamazoo, Michigan, and stayed in the Midwest when the rest of the list family moved east to New Jersey.

Helen, for her part, shuts out the old woman. The two most important people in John lists life will spend the next 20 years quietly at war, and John will spend those years standing between them trying and failing to please them both.

“Shortly after the wedding, Helen tells John, she had been wrong. She was not pregnant after all.”

Whatever he privately thinks, he remains in the marriage. He is married now to a beautiful woman, and that is what a respectable man is supposed to be. Years later, a psychiatrist who evaluates John list will trace a lifetime of quiet resentment back to this beginning. Years, Dr. Stephen Simring, speaking to Annie. He was forced to marry because she said she was pregnant. It turned out that she was not pregnant, and then years later he was resentful about his impression that she perhaps had misled him as a way of getting him to marry her.

Eventually, the children come, Patricia, in 1955, John Jr., the year after that. Fred Rick, two years later.

On the surface, for a while, the lists are exactly the family John always meant to have.

Underneath, however, it doesn't hold.

“John list has a problem, and it is the same problem over and over in one town after another.”

He is good at the narrow tidy work of an accountant, the columns and the ledgers. He is not good at managing people, selling himself, or reading a room. Employers keep deciding, politely, that he is not quite what they hoped for. So the family keeps moving, chasing the next job, each one, supposed to be the fresh start. Michigan, then Rochester, New York, and a good run at the Xerox Company, where by 1965, John climbs to a real title director of accounting services. Later that same year, he is quietly told, "It's time for him to look for something else."

Rebecca Everett, host of the podcast, "Father wants us dead," says the people who worked with John List saw it, too.

“He was a fine accountant. The number is made sense to him. He could do that, but he wasn't really good with people.”

He does not tell Helen how bad it is. He never does.

Helen, for her part, stops pretending to be impressed. Somewhere in these years, she understands that the careful church going man she married is not going to rise in the world, and she lets him feel it. Their pastor back in Rochester remembers overhearing Helen's say to John's face, "If you were half the man my first husband was, we wouldn't be having the troubles we're having." In the fall of 1965, John moves the family to Westfield, New Jersey, for a new job as vice president at a bank, and he sets his heart on a house he cannot come close to affording.

It is a 19-room Victorian mansion, on more than an acre, parked on the best street in town, and it already has its own name. A wealthy man named Wittke had built the house decades earlier. He added a ballroom to show off his art collection through parties under a stained glass skylight and called the place "Breeze Noel." By the time the lists come to see the house Wittke is long dead, his airs have sold the property off and the grand old estate has gone shabby, to John and Helen though it's a dream.

To John especially, it is about the image, or he would later admit was quote, "conspicuous consumption in the extreme." It is a monument, proof of the man he wants the world to believe he is. Almost as soon as they move in, a neighbor walks an apple pie over to welcome them to the neighborhood. The man knocks, the door opens, just to crack, and John list takes the pie and before the man can finish telling John his name, he cuts him off. Thank you very much, John says. We like to keep to ourselves over here.

Closes the door. That is the first thing the folks on Hillside Avenue ever learn about John list. There is the matter of paying for the home. John needs $10,000 just for the down payment, and there is only one person he knows with that kind of money, his mother, Alma. She agrees on one condition that she be allowed to come and live with them. So Alma at 79 moves from Michigan into the small apartment on the third floor in New Jersey, where she will spend what she will call the unhappiest years of her life, and where six years after that, her son will shoot her above the left eye at point blank range.

One day in the future, John list will tell a very different story to Dr. Simrang, appointed by the court, saying that the house had never really been his idea at all.

He made a decision to borrow money from his mother and then invite his mother to live with him.

“There is one more thing happening in that house quietly behind the tall windows. Helen is sick and has been for years with an illness too shameful to admit to the good people of Westfield.”

It started long before John in her first marriage in Korea, where her first husband ran with the bar girls of soul and brought something ugly home to Helen.

For years, doctors missed diagnosis. By the time they identify it correctly, it has reached Helen's brain, the disease is syphilis. Caught early, it is cured by a single injection of penicillin, untreated however after nearly 20 years, it has advanced to the stage that attacks the nervous system, slowly destroying the brain tissue. Antibiotics can still stop it, but they cannot give back what the disease is already taken.

One bright spot for the lists, Helen never gives John or her children the disease. Syphilis can only be passed to another person in the first months after infection.

And Helen was infected in 1947, four years before John ever laid eyes on her in that bowling alley. By the time they marry, it has gone dormant and silent, working away and Helen from the inside, dangerous to no one but her.

“Helen had insisted that she and John marry in Maryland, specifically because the state did not require a blood test, which would have revealed her secret disease.”

It would remain a secret for nearly two decades until a round of blood tests exposed the syphilis in 1968. John took the revelation in stride. Helen keeps the curtains drawn, she drinks Scotch mostly and washes down the tranquilizes her doctors keep prescribing, the combination that only sharpens the disorientation and paranoia the disease already brings. She loses whole afternoons. She grows frightened of people who are not in the room.

The disease, taking her mind apart, traces back to Marvin, her first husband, the war hero, the one man she never stopped loving and never stops throwing in John's face.

“John tells no one, he cooks the dinners, he drives the children to their lessons, he answers the door and his coat and tie and says the family likes to keep to itself.”

But the care is not free. The hospital stays in the long recuperations put a financial squeeze on him that he will not admit to anyone. And it is Helen's illness that first sends John quietly to the bank to borrow against Bree's Null, alone and then a second mortgage that he will not be able to repay. Up the stairs behind him, his wife is disappearing into a disease she caught from a dead man and John list carries it the way he carries everything silently and alone. Everybody's talking about weight loss injections because the results can be so dramatic.

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He kisses his family goodbye at the door backs the car down the long driveway and drives into downtown westfield to the train station where his neighbors are catching the train to their jobs in the city. He doesn't get on that train. He finds a bench and he sits on warm days outside on cold ones inside the station. He reads his Wall Street Journal front to back and then he opens a book usually a history the civil war or other old battles he likes to disappear into. He watches the trains come and go when enough of the day is burned off he picks up the briefcase and drives home again as if he is coming back from the office.

Years earlier his mother had given him power of attorney over her bank account the money John's father left Alma John sees an answer to his financial burdens.

“At first he pays it back and then he stops he keeps meticulous records the entire time neat columns of what he has taken and he tells himself it will be his money one day anyway.”

By the time it's over all that remains is roughly $2,000 in US savings bonds John has drained more than $50,000 out of his elderly mothers savings and she has no idea. Even that is not enough he picks up work selling insurance from home and mutual funds and he is not good at either. By October of 1971 John list vice president comptroller certified public accountant the man in the mansion has earned less than $5,000 for the entire year. He has mortgage the house three times over each new loan taken to pay down the one before it and he is months behind on all three.

The only steady money coming into reasonable is the after school job paychecks of two of his children 16 year old patty and her youngest brother 13 year old Fred.

“In every way that a man like John list can measure himself he is ruined.”

The thing to do now is not let anyone see it, but it leaks out anyway in small strange ways. The neighborhood children learn to give the list house a wide berth cut across his lawn or make too much noise near his hedges and the mild accountant in the suit has been known to scoop up a handful of gravel from his own driveway and hurl it at them. The family down the street the devils keep a pet donkey that they've named Eliza do little after Audrey Hepburn's character in my fair lady every so often old Eliza pulls up her stake and goes wandering in the neighborhood and when she wanders on to John lists lawn he comes out and pitches rocks at the donkey until she leaves.

One of the devlin boys puts it clearly years later you could see he says that it would not take much to make John list just go plain crazy. This is the man the experts will spend decades trying to explain.

“Dr. Simring the psychiatrist later tells news 12 that John list is not a monster that anyone could have seen coming but a rigid resentful man whose life is collapsing faster than he can hide the pieces.”

It's not a psychopath he was not a sociopath he was not a man without a conscience I think he had a lifelong of resentment of lack of success and I think it got to him. There is a room under the ballroom that John insists on calling the bill your groom though there's been no bill your table in it for years. It is where he goes to be alone and where he keeps the things that comfort him his Bible is books on true crime. A shelf full of war games elaborate tabletop campaigns he disappears into for hours moving whole armies across a board.

Two of them called third Reich and Russian front he is played for years.

Whatever the game whoever sits across the board from him John list takes the German side every single time. John once took his brother-in-law down into that cellar pointed out the dark corners and the hidden passages and said almost idly a man could hide for six months down here if he had food and water. It struck his brother-in-law as such a strange thing to say that he repeated it to his wife that night. On the wall on John's calendar there is a date in November with a thick red circle drawn around it because sometime in the summer of 1971 alone in that basement with his war games and his Bible and his debts John list begins to plan a battle of his own.

In October he goes into the Westfield police station for the second time that year.

This time he gets finger-printed and applies for a permit to buy a handgun home protection he tells the cops never can be too safe.

There is one person John list feels is drifting further from his grip. It's his daughter Patricia is 16 and she wants more than anything in the world to be an actress. She is fallen in with the drama crowd at school and in a local theater group a world of rehearsals and older kids and late nights. And to a man like her father that world is a threat to her very soul. To John list in his strict reading of his faith the stage is not a wholesome dream for a girl but a step towards sin.

In the documentary tracking down John list Dr. Simring puts a fine point on this.

Patricia has also started talking back to her father and she no longer bothers to hide how bored she is in church.

“There are things he hears about the company she keeps that frightened him more than backtalk.”

Patty and her friends have taken to playing with a wici board trying to reach the spirits. There are whispers half teenage theater and half something darker that Patricia has begun calling herself a witch. Her closest friends church kids themselves do not know what to make of it and it scares them. To a father who reads the Bible aloud every night and takes every word of it literally this is not a phase a girl grows out of. It is his daughter's very soul sliding toward the fire while he stands and watches.

His fear runs so deep that on the night the police pick up Patty he turns on the girl standing next to her.

One of Patty's friends, a teenager named Rhonda Hansen he barely knows and says it to her face. Patty's father was irate. He just started carrying on yelling at Patty and then he said to me you're a bitch as well as a witch.

“To the friends who actually knew her none of it made Patty anything stranger than a teenager with a hard father.”

Her friend Barry Cohen later says as much in the documentary tracking down John list. I think that is a normal kid. You know if you had a straight-laced father like him who was probably very restrictive and very disapproving. You tend to be rebellious. Not long before the end.

Over one of those wager boards Patricia turns to a friend and says a thing that friend will carry for the rest of her life. I have a feeling she says that something bad is going to happen. She doesn't say what she doesn't say who. John list comes to believe or tells himself he does that the only options left are all unbearable. Bankruptcy, welfare, his children growing up poor and worse growing up and drifting away from the church,

losing their faith in the loud, permissive, godless world of 1971. Becoming hippies, he looks at his daughter and at his sick wife who no longer goes to church and he sees two souls slipping away. The psychiatrist who would later reconstruct his thinking reduced it to grim arithmetic. Here's Dr. Simring speaking to New Jersey.com. His choices of a universe of choices came down to three choices.

Run away, go bankrupt, kill his family. John arrives at a cold piece of logic. If he kills them now while they are still innocent, still obedient Christians, then their souls are safe. They go to heaven. He's not murdering his family. He's saving them. What lets a man hold a thought like that and then act on it is not madness.

By the psychiatrist account, it is something colder and far more ordinary as he tells New Jersey.com. He meets clearly the criteria for obsessive, compulsive personality. These are individuals who are emotionally isolated, they're not cruel, but they're emotionally isolated. They don't show feelings, they don't have very much in the way of feelings. They don't cry a whole lot, they're not emotional, they are very, very detailed oriented.

They rationalize things that happen. On the night of Friday, November 5th, 1971, John Lest calls his three children to the kitchen table. He is calm, he is not shouting, he tells them he can no longer take care of them the way a father should. Men in the flat practical voice of an accountant, he asks each child a question no child should ever have to answer.

“When the time comes, would they rather be buried or cremated?”

Barry, the children say one by one, and then John gets up, walks out, and closes his office door behind him. In the weeks before the end, she tells more friends the same thing, or father, she says, once them all dead.

John had wanted to do it a few days earlier on the first of November all Saints Day, a day he thought fitting for sending souls to heaven.

Something delayed him, so he settles on a new date, the one circled in red, and he plans it, the way he plans everything. Down to the last hour, down to every last detail, the morning of November 9th, 1971 comes cold and gray.

He opens his budget book, the ledger of everything gone wrong, and he draws a single neat line beneath the final row of figures.

“He twists his college-class ring office finger, and sets it on the desk.”

He opens the red-covered Lutheran hymnel, his church has used since 1941, and turns to a hymn called "The World is very evil."

He reads it to himself, softly, humming as his eyes follow the verse, "The world is very evil.

“The times are waxing late, be sober, and keep vigil. The judge is at the gate."”

Then John Lest goes to a file cabinet, and he takes out the Austrian pistol he brought home from the war 27 years ago, and loads it.

Upstairs, a toilet flushes, the house is beginning to wake up.

“Sunrise he knows will be at 6.36. Soon Helen will come down in her bathrobe to make her coffee.”

John Lest sits in a study, in a coat and tie, with a loaded gun, and waits for his wife. John has told himself this is mercy, that he is the only one who can save them, and that the way to save them is to kill them. He thinks he's found the one solution to an impossible problem. He's run the numbers, and they balance. November 9, 1971, the day John Lest carries out his plan, one member of his family at a time.

Later, he will sit down in the house where he has slaughtered them all, have dinner, alone, watch the dishes, and go to sleep. That's next time, on MK Confidential.